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what email do you value?

I've long used server-side mail filtering to prioritize the large amount of daily email I get. I also claim that I value code reviews and user feedback very highly. Recently, I've adjusted my mail filters to match my claims.

Before, I filtered ALL mailing lists into folders, one per list. Any message that was also adressed directly TO or CC me had a copy placed directly in my inbox, and I check my inbox a couple of times per day and clean it out. Periodically I also read the various mailing lists I am subscribed to, but this varies depending on what type of tasks I am doing and could easily go a couple of days to a couple of weeks without checking in on a given mailing list. Since the code review list and user feedback list also were lists, they got ignored more than I liked, and I felt bad about it. But I finally realized that feeling bad is silly, tuning my filters to match my personal values is much better. So now, all mail from end users and all code review mail goes directly into my inbox. It definitely puts more burden on me to keep up with the mail, and a lot of it I delete really quickly. But I feel a lot more connected with what is going on in our very large code base and with any sudden hot discussions that come up on the users list. Yay!